'The Crucible': Theater Review - Ciaran Hinds

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'The Crucible': Theater Review

5:00 PM PDT 3/31/2016 by David Rooney

Elizabeth Teeter, Saoirse Ronan and Tavi Gevinson in 'The Crucible' Jan Versweyveld

Saoirse Ronan leads the accusers in this revival of Arthur Miller's morality play about the Salem witch trials, with Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo as John and Elizabeth Proctor.

After enlivening the downtown theater scene for years with his iconoclastic takes on classic texts, Ivo van Hove continues his bracing entry into the Broadway arena with his second production of an Arthur Miller drama. While The Crucible is a very different play from A View From the Bridge, which the Belgian avant-garde director staged to ecstatic acclaim earlier in the season, the two works can also be seen as companion-piece tragedies. Both end with an accused man's wrenching refusal to be stripped of his name. However, in The Crucible, that man's innocence of the crimes with which he is charged adds blistering heat to the corruption of power that Miller so vehemently targeted. Van Hove knows how to channel that heat. Almost operatic in their intensity, his productions are designed to leave audiences agitated and uncomfortable, which is notably the case with this distressing 1953 drama, with its steadily amplified sense of horror and indignation.

Like the director's View From the Bridge, the mesmerizingly acted new production trades the play's specific period and milieu -- the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 -- for a pared-down look and non-naturalistic, indeterminate setting. Wojciech Dziedzic's utilitarian costumes and Jan Versweyveld's single set, a vast, high-ceilinged schoolroom, suggest the 1950s. But the intention appears not to evoke Miller's allegorical subject, the McCarthy scourge, when citizens were coerced to name suspected Communist sympathizers, ruining lives and careers. Nor does van Hove seem interested in underlining contemporary parallels in an election year in which one of the leading candidates has fueled support by trading on fear and hostility.

Instead, the production presents a chilling account of the institutional arrogance and ignorance that are a threat to civil liberties in any age, particularly when the dividing lines separating politics, religion and the judiciary become blurred. Episodes of mob-mentality recklessness and its consequences are present throughout history, and Miller's cautionary tale remains a trenchant illustration of the dangers of demagogic leadership destroying a community by disseminating distrust and paranoia.

The face of this production is Saoirse Ronan, icy and commanding in her first stage appearance. She follows her breakout film work as the timid Irish girl who blossoms so tenderly to self-possessed maturity in Brooklyn with a sharp pivot to simmering resentment and reflexive cruelty that erupt out of sexual, religious and class repression. Her Abigail Williams in fact could almost be an older version of one of Ronan's earliest screen roles, the vicious little minx in Atonement. Her accusing finger is what sets the accelerating hysteria in motion to the point where nobody is safe. And when it comes vengefully to rest on the blameless Elizabeth Proctor (Sophie Okonedo), who dismissed Abigail after the servant girl had sex in the barn with her guilt-ridden husband, John (Ben Whishaw), the fury of the inquisition is multiplied.

The production opens with a brief curtain-up on the girls singing a prayer while seated facing a rear-wall blackboard on which the Puritan text "The Dutiful Child's Promise" is written in chalk. Their piety thus inferred, we then witness their gullibility as Abigail, the natural leader, grasps to cover up the reasons why they were found dancing in the woods. Ronan's steely calculation is beautifully contrasted by the guilelessness of Mary Warren, the innately good, not terribly bright girl who tries to speak out about their dangerous make-believe tricks. She's played with affecting openness by Tavi Gevinson, who continues to emerge as a remarkably instinctive actor after last season's This Is Our Youth.

Sophie Okonedo and Ben Whishaw in 'The Crucible'

One element of the production that no doubt will be divisive is van Hove's decision to visualize the supernatural manifestations that the girls succeed in conjuring in the fertile imagination of a populace primed for hellfire. While many productions have staged the unscripted nocturnal frolic that causes the trouble, van Hove skips it. But he includes levitation, a prowling wolf and electrifying scenes of the group's feigned trances. Those interludes are choreographed as convulsive ballets by Steven Hoggett, accompanied by jittery animation that spreads across the blackboard. The intention is clearly not to show that the witchcraft is real, but that the power of suggestion has made it so, for the girls as well as the onlookers.

Van Hove observes the careful mechanisms of Miller's construction, with a first act that expertly defines the various townsfolk and their roles in the gathering calamity. There are incisive performances from Jason Butler Harner as Abigail's uncle, the slippery Rev. Samuel Parris, eager to steer the suspicion of witchery away from his afflicted daughter; Tina Benko and Thomas Jay Ryan as Ann and Thomas Putnam, loathsome alarmists who feed the panic; and Brenda Wehle, superb as Rebecca Nurse, a charitable pillar of the community who dismisses the adolescent girls' feverishness as the "silly season" she recognizes from her numerous children and grandchildren. The price she pays for her clear-sighted skepticism is as shattering as the fates of the Proctors.

Also on the victims' side of the uproar is the disputatious old farmer Giles Corey, played with fiery irascibility by the wonderful Jim Norton. The character with the most complex moral arc is Rev. John Hale, the learned religious authority brought in to oversee the proceedings. Bill Camp makes a strong impression in the part. Initially swallowing the fraudulent testimony of Abigail and her pawns, he's solemn and self-important, before realizing too late his role in sending innocent people to the gallows. There's no such awakening of conscience in Ciaran Hinds' imperious Deputy Governor Danforth, who sends a chill into the air from the moment he strides onto the stage, full of rigid certainty before he's even interrogated a witness.

Some will argue that Miller's already somewhat preachy, portentous text doesn't need any emphatic help, though the original score by Philip Glass -- an almost wall-to-wall sonic carpeting of needling percussion, mournful chants and funereal strings -- contributes to the

production's ever-tightening noose. Also tremendously effective is Versweyveld's unforgiving lighting and Tom Gibbons' creepy sound, nowhere more so than in the startling stagecraft that blows the turmoil of Salem directly into the Proctors' farmhouse.

As strong as the ensemble is, the indispensable anchoring forces are Whishaw and Okonedo, both of them devastating. Miller wrote Elizabeth as a virtual saint, so it helps that Okonedo plays her early scenes with an almost brittle detachment. But the stoicism she exhibits through her suffering is heartbreaking, as is the pain behind her refusal to judge her compromised husband as he agonizes over whether to make a false confession and save himself.

Whishaw seems unconventional casting for John, a role often played by older, brawnier types -- Liam Neeson, Iain Glen and Richard Armitage in recent stage productions; Daniel Day-Lewis onscreen. But the actor brings stirring truth to Proctor's fatal progression from a man already somewhat suspicious of doctrinaire thinking and its cowering followers to one who openly condemns the blind religious and legal zealotry that have ripped apart his community. He holds nothing back in the play's harrowing final emotional crescendo, a scorching indictment of fearmongering and its cost to individual freedom.

Venue: Walter Kerr Theatre, New York Cast: Ben Whishaw, Sophie Okonedo, Ciaran Hinds, Saoirse Ronan, Bill Camp, Tavi Gevinson, Jason Butler Harner, Jim Norton, Tina Benko, Jenny Jules, Thomas Jay Ryan, Brenda Wehle, Teagle F. Bougere, Michael Braun, Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, Elizabeth Teeter, Ray Anthony Thomas, Erin Wilhelmi Director: Ivo van Hove Playwright: Arthur Miller Set & lighting designer: Jan Versweyveld Costume designer: Wojciech Dziedzic Sound designer: Tim Gibbons Video designer: Tal Yarden Movement director: Steven Hoggett Executive producers: Joey Parnes, Sue Wagner, John Johnson Presented by Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Roger Berlind, William Berlind, Len Blavatnik, Roy Furman, Peter May, Jay Alix & Una Jackman, Scott M. Delman, JFL Theatricals, Heni Koenigsberg, Daryl Roth, Jane Bergere, Sonia Friedman, Ruth Hendel, Stacey Mindich, Jon B. Platt, Megan Savage, Spring Sirkin, Tulchin Bartner Productions

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Theater Review: Ivo van Hove's The Crucible Heightens the Vitality of a Familiar Story

By Jesse Green

Photo: Jan Versweyveld

According to one survey of high-school lit teachers, The Crucible by Arthur Miller is the most widely taught play, outside of Shakespeare, in American classrooms. (A Raisin in the Sun and Death of a Salesman follow.) Given the way it's almost universally presented -- as a point-bypoint mapping of the McCarthy "witch hunts" of the 1940s and '50s onto the actual witch trials of Puritan Salem in 1692 -- it's probably received by most students, no less than by most theater critics, as cod-liver oil, more medicinal than entertaining. Reviews of the 1953 Broadway premiere highlighted Miller's political passion and daring; the play was certainly a response to, and a kind of baiting of, the House Un-American Activities Committee. But to many, the passion was achieved at the cost of theatrical imagination. George Jean Nathan called The Crucible "an honorable sermon" whose sting had been "disinfected with an editorial tincture." I wonder what Nathan (and generations of American sophomores) would make of the gripping, emotional revival, directed by the Belgian avant-gardist Ivo van Hove, that opened tonight at the Walter Kerr. (Kerr himself called the play a "mechanical parable" that "lives not in the warmth of humbly observed human souls but in the ideological heat of polemic.") They would of course recognize the story; the text has been slightly edited, with the permission of the Miller estate, but unless you recently reread it, you would hardly notice the disappearance of a few minor characters, such as the homeless woman Sarah Good. It is still a brilliant demonstration of the hysteria to which a repressive society is susceptible, as trumped-up charges of witchcraft ignite a disastrous series of betrayals.

But even on paper it is more than a "demonstration." Part of the moral beauty of the play is its alertness to the ambiguities of blame for those charges: Does the trouble begin with Abigail Williams, the precocious 17-year-old caught dancing in the woods with four other girls in a manner the Puritans consider prima facie diabolical? Or is Abigail, who immediately rats on the black servant, merely an intermediary link in the chain? For as surely as the infection extends outward into the public sphere, bringing down even the town's most valued citizens, it also extends inward and backward, implicating individual relationships and psychopathology. Abigail's hysteria, we quickly learn, is fundamentally romantic. Still in love with John Proctor, a married man who "knew" her but then cast her out, she hopes to regain his affection by eliminating the competition. "She thinks to dance with me on my wife's grave," Proctor says grimly of Abigail's accusations.

So is John Proctor to blame? Or, taking a step even further back, is his wife, Elizabeth? (She's dour.) Or is the external pressure of the powerful -- the arriviste reverend, the imperious deputy governor who descends on Salem to conduct the trials -- more salient? One by one, the play tests each individual who comes into contact with the superheated situation. Some are merely venal or cowardly, but some buckle in order to protect others, and one, in a classic Miller moment, takes the high road for a low reason. It is not only the bad who behave badly, The Crucible demonstrates. Good people are inevitably implicated, if only by their attempts at passivity.

This atmosphere of contagion and moral panic obviously parallels that fomented by HUAC; Miller was inspired to write the play after his friend Elia Kazan "named names" in 1952. But at the same time, Miller's deliberate distortions of the Salem record usually complicate rather than support the parallels. (Proctor is younger and Abigail older than their historical antecedents, presumably to activate the sexual component of the story.) Indeed, it's difficult to fathom how the plot itself, with its keenly psychological bent, could be reduced so simplistically to the mere parable often seen by critics (and teachers). Certainly van Hove's production does everything possible to foreground the human questions, partly by neutralizing the exotic specifics. It is set (by Jan Versweyveld) in a schoolroom, albeit one so vast and cold it looks like a repurposed New England warehouse. Wojciech Dziedzic's costumes, while by no means period, are modest enough to avoid suggesting that physical comfort and freedom are part of the world these characters inhabit. And van Hove (working with the choreographer Steven Hoggett) does wonderful things with his staging, especially of the teenage girls. They disperse and clump for warmth like bats, an image that suggests both virality and vulnerability. Through such choices we understand Miller's irony that those accused of wielding demonic power are those who have none of the regular kind.

If van Hove's directorial choices generally support and enliven the text, and force us to see it fresh, it's not because he has abandoned his avant-garde armamentarium. This Crucible features plenty of his signature flourishes, some more effective than others. As in his recent production of A View From the Bridge, he overdoes the mood music, here an original score by Philip Glass that gets annoying fast. Literalists may not like the intrusions of magic in the form of some nifty video and special effects; I heard some audience members complain that these effects muddied Miller's argument by suggesting that witchcraft really occurred. (I wouldn't have thought a production needed to immunize itself against such an interpretation!) For me, the effects not only demonstrated the mental state of those transported by hysteria, but extended it, viscerally, to the audience. Even the arrival at the beginning of the second act of a character not mentioned in the script made sense to me as a way of reawakening our imaginations to horror. In van Hove's vision of Miller's world, the distinctions between human and inhuman, between animate and inanimate, are always collapsing. When the act curtain on more than one occasion went up then quickly down before rising once more, as if by itself, it seemed to be saying to us: Look again.

On the occasions that van Hove's ideas have become problematic, it's because they have replaced or obscured the interpersonal conflict that fuels most plays. In his version of The Little Foxes for New York Theatre Workshop in 2010, for instance, the formidable cast seemed entirely secondary to a concept involving live video. That's not a problem here (nor was it in A View From the Bridge). Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo, as the Proctors, give wrenching performances, shorn of vanity, as if the play's message of communal guilt had infected them personally. As the deputy governor, Ciar?n Hinds does a bit of Pacino-style word swallowing but nevertheless offers a richly complicated portrait of the vanity of power. (One way The Crucible doesn't track with the Red Scare* is that this character is so much smarter than Joseph McCarthy.) In important supporting roles, Jason Butler Harner, Tina Benko, Thomas Jay Ryan, Brenda Wehle, Bill Camp, and Jim Norton all make strong impressions while being dragged down by the whirlpool of communal rage. But it seems as if van Hove could not decide how he wanted to interpret the girls. Saoirse Ronan as Abigail suggests no real excuse for her cold manipulations: She just shines with maleficence. And as Mary Warren, the girl who vacillates about the truth, Tavi Gevinson (who is just 19 herself) does not quite convince us on either side of her story.

She's heartbreaking anyway; that's the power of Miller's writing. I think the mistake critics and teachers often make about The Crucible is that they read it like a novel, and sometimes it's staged that way, all bonnets and doublets. Van Hove sweeps all that away, letting us feel more strongly the role the play's overwhelming structural brilliance plays in locking us down. It's not that Miller isn't interested in characters, it's that he sees society as a kind of ?ber-character, and not a very magnanimous one. (HUAC revoked his passport to attend the play's 1954 London opening.) The result isn't medicinal, it's terrifying, when done right. This is the first production of The Crucible I've seen in which the devil, which is to say us collectively, is really given his due.

The Crucible is at the Walter Kerr Theater through July 17.

*This review originally misidentified the composer of the original score and contained a historical inaccuracy. We regret the errors.

FROM

Wolves are at the door in seductive Broadway revival of 'The Crucible,' starring Saoirse Ronan

by Chris Jones

A lone wolf prowls through Salem, Mass., in Ivo van Hove's eye-popping and wholly unconventional revival of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," that great dramatic cautionary tale about the perennial dangers of a rampant theocracy fueled by ignorance and mass hysteria. This is not a metaphoric mammal, but a literal beast, actually a lupine-looking canine known as a Tamaskan, that prowls onstage in Act 2, stops center stage and exerts such a force over the proceedings that one fears he might decide to chow down on Row E the same way the dangerous seductress Abigail Williams, played in full-on seduction mode by the excellent young star Saoirse Ronan, eats up Ben Whishaw's John Proctor, her married quarry. "I have a sense for heat, John," she says, dressed provocatively in contemporary schoolgirl attire, "and you have drawn me to your window." Proctor's moral authority to stop the prosecution of the innocent thus is compromised as surely as a Southern governor submerged in a sex scandal, which was, of course, one of Miller's central points in 1953, when this play about witch trials could be applied to a political witch hunt of a different kind, when writers and artists named names to save themselves. But van Hove is not so much interested in McCarthyism and history as in tyranny of the more perennial sort; this production feels more attuned to our world of school shooters and suicide

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